Nearly 63 million adults voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and our conscientious media will not rest until each and every Typical Trump Voter within that seething morass has been located, interviewed, profiled, photo-captioned, pondered, and tagged for future taxidermy. Their opinions, no matter how uninformed and frequently la-la, are solemnly recorded as clues to the mood of the country, which always seems to range from disgruntled to thoroughly disgusted. The process to determine what constitutes a Typical Trump Voter is unwritten, unspoken, and uncodified, but in practice he or she is drawn straight from central casting. Suburban couples who look as if they just stepped hand in hand out of an episode of HGTV’s House Hunters don’t make the cut: too bougie and lacking the weathered grain of hard times. Sunbelt retirement villages that went big for Trump occasionally get the extended look-in (“Generation Pickleball: Welcome to Florida’s Political Tomorrowland,” by Michael Grunwald, Politico Magazine, June 18, 2018), but the residents, living it up like Del Boca Vista aristocrats, are too set in their ways to offer a gritty dramatis personae for a journalistic parable about Americans in a time of jarring transition.

Editors are looking for stories on Trump voters who are making do, soldiering on, hanging tough, wishing each other “Merry Christmas” instead of that heathen “Happy Holidays,” and extending the president the benefit of the doubt no matter how many times he does them rotten. Small-town, heartland, blue-collar, bingo-hall, left-behind authentic representatives and descendants of the “Real America” whom hip elitist bi-coastals and technocrat politicians ignore, until their votes bite Democrats in the butt. So where does an enterprising reporter go to bag a focus group of Trump voters in their native habitat? The local diner.

And not just any diner. Definitely not one of those Silver Diners, a chain that offers “Flexitarian” menus, whatever the fancy hell that means, or one of those shiny faux-retro diners in the suburbs catering to Happy Days nostalgia. No, it has to be a diner that still offers a wood-paneled haven steeped in the aroma and kitchen grease of yesteryear, a clientele of rumpled regulars, an old cathode-tube TV in the corner, and voilà . . . “Steven Whitt fires up the coffeepot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.” So begins a dispatch from Claire Galofaro, an A.P. reporter whose special beat is Trump Country, in a story dated December 28, 2017. The Frosty Freeze is in Elliott County, Kentucky, a region in worsening distress which in 2016, for the first time, broke its string of going Democratic, betting on Trump to be the turnaround guy. Trip Gabriel is The New York Times’s unofficial Trump roving diner correspondent. In “In Iowa, Trump Voters Are Unfazed by Controversies,” Gabriel opened at one diner (“The eight men around a rectangular table, sipping coffee from a hodgepodge of mugs donated by customers, meet daily for breakfasts of French toast, eggs and bacon at Darrell’s diner”), then popped into another, where he quoted a waitress who didn’t vote in the 2016 election because she didn’t like either candidate, not exactly a gem worth extracting. Reuters reporter Tim Reid also drew blanks when he corralled a trio of Trump supporters at a Bob Evans diner in Jackson, Ohio, and asked their opinions on the Russia investigation. “I have never heard anything about it,” imparted Chastity Banks, and neither had the other two Trumpies. At Nana Dee’s Diner, in Mesa, Arizona, CNN interviewed a quartet of Trump supporters over the family-separation policy at the border that was ripping children from their parents. “I think people need to stop constantly bringing up the poor children, the poor children,” complained one old dear. “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children.” Yes, that does sound like the heartfelt, cankered voice of a Trumpian.

Editors are looking for stories on Trump voters who are making do, hanging tough.

The journalistic device of converting diner patrons into field studies didn’t originate in the aftermath of Trump’s upset victory. It’s a hoary practice that became a staple in campaign coverage of political caucuses and primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the diner became the go-to spot for getting the ornery lowdown from the red-flannel-plaid set. The deadline laureate of this hunter-gatherer journalism was the Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder, the “dean” of the Washington press corps, who knocked on doors at dinner hour, interviewed subjects on park benches, and convened impromptu focus groups of diner patrons to get a feel for shifts in sentiment that had eluded correspondents trailing candidates from stop to stop. Broder put in the shoe leather and brought back the goods on his Tocquevillian rounds, but today that approach has become a cliché, a traffic jam, a theatrical genre. The patrons have become self-conscious in their role-playing as Average Americans, trying to finish their cardboard waffles while the politicians go glad-handing from table to table surrounded by a scrum.

It is unusual, however, to keep returning to diners, bars, and American Legion halls to take the temperatures of one sliver of the electorate and gussy up their predictable sound bites with descriptive dabs of short-storyish scene-setting. (The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri did a hilarious send-up of this woebegone naturalism: “In the shadow of the old flag factory, Craig Slabornik sits whittling away on a rusty nail, his only hobby since the plant shut down.”) It not only privileges the attitudes of one subset of voters but it leaves a lopsided impression of the whole mural. “The media is blinded by its obsession with rural white Trump voters,” Ryan Cooper argued forcibly in a column for The Week last December. “Trump does—or did—have unusual levels of blue-collar support, but the actual bulk of Trump support is the same old professional, petty bourgeois, and ultra-wealthy capitalists who have been voting Republican for generations.” And, Cooper notes, this zoom-in on rural whites has “largely ignored the black and brown working class who never fell for Trump’s nonsense.”

Since the election we’ve heard a steady tom-tom beat even from those on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, that it was economic anxiety that drove many traditional white working-class voters away from the Democrats into the pelican flappers of Donald Trump. But the hate, bigotry, and cackling cruelty of the circus maximus that is Trump’s first term carries too loud a primal yowl to be ascribed to stagnant wages and factory closings. Something far more septic and serrated is going on. Deep data mining, as opposed to anecdotal fishing at the diner, has unearthed a more plausible driver for the Trump victory: not “economic anxiety” but racial animosity. A roundup of post-election studies and surveys by German Lopez at Vox cited a paper by a trio of social scientists that found “that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.” The headline for a long, exhaustively detailed article in The Nation by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel slammed home the point with a two-by-four: “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.”

I’d like to toss something else into the mix when it comes to diagnosing what’s eating at the craw of the Typical Trump Voter: a raging hatred of liberals. Liberals, especially the “liberal media,” have become the all-purpose blame bucket for everything, and “owning the libs” the primary directive of the Steve Bannon brigade. It reveals its snarling face at the Trump rallies that the cable networks insist on covering, putting their reporters in jeopardy as Trump lashes up a hate storm over “fake news” and incites his supporters to get their freak on against the liberal media, which some of them do with gusto: hectoring, spitting, bellowing f-words from their hippo mouths, and flipping the middle finger, a terrible way for Grandpa and Grandma to behave. With each Trump rally drawing a larger faction of conspiracy nuts, the threat of violence gains velocity, as reporters from some of the very outlets paying such nuanced attention to Typical Trump Voters—The New York Times, CNN, and so on—are reviled as enemies of the people. Time to drop a cloth over this parrot cage. I think we’ve heard more than enough verbal static from the Trump base. There’s nothing more to learn from them, and it’s time the doting stopped.